Monday, August 30, 2010

Zoya Spooning: Weirdest Ad Ever

Update: Apparently the "Spoons" idea is a LOT more boring than any of us thought. It's basically swatches of a nail polish on a fake nail that you can order. Yes, really. It's supposed to help you never order the wrong colour ever again, because you can hold the fake nail up to your real nail and see it against your skin. And this fake nail swatch is all yours for 50 cents. Is that lame or what? There are bloggers aplenty who swatch with awesome colour accuracy, and anyone can paint polish on a fake nail and sell it for less than 50 cents. They can even buy up new collections and swatch them all and sell them for less than a buck! Sorry Zoya, I'm not excited by this at all.


(Picture from MUA)


If you haven't already heard, Zoya plans to introduce this product called "spooning" on 1st September. Apparently they thought mystery was the best publicity, so they put out a rather cryptic ad on Youtube, with an overenthusiastic girl gushing about how "spooning is amazing" - without telling us what spooning is, of course. They're keeping us in suspense til the official launch date.

Personally, I don't like the ad. I know the whole suspense thing can be a valuable asset in a marketing campaign, but I don't think the Spooning ad got it quite right. After I watched the video, I was left frowning and scratching my head, instead of feeling intrigued and curious. And the acting kind of annoyed me a little, and it didn't add to the sense of mystery, either. I mean, if you want to be mysterious, why have an overly perky girl shilling your product? They don't quite go together, somehow.

That said, I suppose that me blogging about it means that as far as this blog is concerned, Zoya has probably done it's job (i.e. gotten people like me to talk about it). But seriously, this has gotta be the weirdest ad ever for a nail polish product. And not in a good way.



Of course, as you might imagine, what spooning exactly is has been speculated about, to some extent. Guesses I've heard are the option to franken your own polish, by mixing "spoons" of Zoya's current polishes together, or maybe a sample system by which you can order "spoons" or trial sizes of polishes before getting the full sized ones. These both sound reasonable to me. I really like the frankening idea, though! I'm hoping it will mean that we can mix our own polishes from Zoya's current stock online, and then order it just like any other colour.

What do you think of the ad? Sufficiently intriguing, or just confusing? Any guesses as to what "spooning" is?